17

BERTIL LINTNER

Religious Extremism and Nationalism

in Bangladesh

W hen East Pakistan broke away from the main western

part of the country to form Bangladesh in 1971, it was in opposition
to the notion that all Muslim areas of former British India should
unite in one state. The Awami League, which led the struggle for inde-
pendence, grew out of the Bangla language movement and was based
on Bengali nationalism, not religion. At the same time, independent,
secular Bangladesh became the only country in the subcontinent with
one dominant language group and very few ethnic and religious
minorities.
It is important to remember that a Muslim element has always been
present; otherwise what was East Pakistan could have merged with
the predominantly Hindu Indian state of West Bengal, where the
same language is spoken. The importance of Islam grew as the
Awami League fell out with the country’s powerful military, which
began to use religion as a counterweight to the League’s secular,
vaguely socialist policies. (Many hard-line socialists, however, were
opposed to the idea of a separate Bengali state in Bangladesh, which
they branded as “bourgeois nationalism.”) The late Bangladeshi

413
414 BERTIL LINTNER

scholar Muhammad Ghulam Kabir argued that Maj. Gen. Zia ur-
Rahman, who seized power in the mid-1970s, “successfully changed
the image of Bangladesh from a liberal Muslim country to an Islamic
country.”1 M.G. Kabir also points out that “secularism” is a hazy and
often misunderstood concept in Bangladesh. The Bengali term for it
is dharma mirapekshata, which literally translates to “religious neutral-
ity.” Thus, the word “secularism” in a Bangladeshi context has a sub-
tle difference in meaning from its use in the West.2
In 1977, Zia dropped secularism as one of the four cornerstones of
Bangladesh’s constitution (the other three were democracy, national-
ism, and socialism, although no socialist economic system was ever
introduced) and made the recitation of verses from the Quran a reg-
ular practice at meetings with his newly formed political organization,
the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which became the second-
largest party in the country after the Awami League. The marriage of
convenience between the military—which needed popular appeal and
an ideological platform to justify its opposition to the Awami
League—and the country’s Islamic forces survived Zia’s assassination
in 1981.
In some respects, it grew even stronger under the rule of Lt. Gen.
Hossain Muhammed Ershad (1982–90). In 1988, Ershad made Islam
the state religion of Bangladesh, thus institutionalizing the new
brand of nationalism with an Islamic flavor introduced by Zia.
Ershad also changed the weekly holiday from Sunday to Friday, and
revived the Jamaat-i-Islami to counter secular opposition. The Jamaat
had supported Pakistan against the Bengali nationalists during the
liberation war, and most of its leaders had fled to (West) Pakistan
after 1971. Under Zia, they came back and brought with them new,
fundamentalist ideas. Under Ershad, Islam became a political factor
to be reckoned with.
Ershad was deposed in December 1990 following anti-government
protests and was later convicted of a number of offences and jailed.
But this did not lead to a return to old secular practices. Zia’s widow
and the new leader of the BNP, Khaleda Zia, became prime minister
after a general election in February 1991. This was a time when the

1. Muhammad Ghulam Kabir, Changing Face of Nationalism: The Case of Bangladesh

(New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 1994), 201.
2. Ibid., 189.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM AND NATIONALISM IN BANGLADESH 415

Islamic forces consolidated their influence in Bangladesh, but it came

to a halt when the Awami League, led by Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the
daughter of Bangladesh’s founding father, Sheikh Mujib ur-Rahman,
won the 1996 election. Five years later, an electoral four-party alliance
led by Khaleda Zia’s BNP came to power—and the new coalition that
took over included for the first time two ministers from the Jamaat,
which had emerged as the third-largest party, capturing seventeen
seats in the three hundred-strong parliament.
The BNP rode on a wave of dissatisfaction with the Awami League,
which many perceived as corrupt, but the four-party alliance was able
to win a massive majority—191 seats for the BNP and 23 seats for its
three allies—only because of the British-style system with one winner
per constituency, and the alliance members all voted for each other.
The Awami League remains the single biggest political party in
Bangladesh with 40 percent of the popular vote, but it secured only
62 seats, or 20.66 percent of the members of parliament (MPs) in the
election (it now has 58 seats because four were relinquished due to
election of MPs from more than one seat).3
Expectations were high for the new government, which many
hoped would be “cleaner” than the previous one. In June 2001, the
Berlin-based organization Transparency International had in its
annual report ranked Bangladesh the world’s most corrupt country.4
But since the new government took over in October 2001, very little
has changed in that regard. Further, violence has become widespread
and much of it appears to be religiously and politically motivated. The
Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD), a well-
respected Bangladeshi non-governmental organization (NGO),
quotes a local report that says non-Muslim minorities have suffered as
a result: “The intimidation of the minorities, which had begun before
the election, became worse afterwards.”5 Amnesty International
reported in December 2001 that Hindus—who now make up less
than 10 percent of Bangladesh‘s population of 130 million—in par-
ticular have come under attack. Hindu places of worship have been

3. The Eighth Parliamentary Elections 2001 (Dhaka: Society for Environment and
Human Development for Coordinating Council for Human Rights in Bangladesh,
March 2002), 2.
4. http://www.transparency.org/cpi/2001/cip2001.html.
5. Eighth Parliamentary Elections 2001, 161.
416 BERTIL LINTNER

ransacked, villages destroyed and scores of Hindu women are

reported to have been raped.6
While the Jamaat may not be directly behind these attacks, its inclu-
sion in the government has meant that more radical groups feel they
now enjoy protection from the authorities and can act with impunity.
The most militant group, the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI, or the
Movement of Islamic Holy War), is reported to have fifteen thousand
members. Bangladeshi Hindus and moderate Muslims hold HUJI
responsible for many of the recent attacks against religious minorities,
secular intellectuals and journalists. In a statement released by the U.S.
State Department on May 21, 2002, HUJI is described as a terrorist
organization with ties to Islamic militants in Pakistan.7
While Bangladesh is yet far from becoming another Pakistan,
Islamic forces are no doubt on the rise, and extremist influence is
growing, especially in the countryside. According to a foreign diplo-
mat in Dhaka, “in the 1960s and 1970s, it was the leftists who were
seen as incorruptible purists. Today, the role model for many young
men in rural areas is the dedicated Islamic cleric with his skull cap,
flowing robes and beard.”8

The Return of the Jamaat-i-Islami

THE IDEA THAT the Muslim-dominated parts of British India should
become a separate country was articulated for the first time in a short
essay written in 1933 by Rahmat Ali, an Indian Muslim student at
Cambridge. He even proposed a name for the new state—Pakistan—
which was an acronym based on the nations that would compose it:
the Punjab, Afghan (the Northwest Frontier), Kashmir, Indus (or
Sindh) and BaluchiSTAN. The new name also meant “the Land of
the Pure.”
However, the acronym did not include India’s most populous
Muslim province, East Bengal, and, at first, most Islamic groups
opposed the idea of religious nationalism. The most prestigious

6. Amnesty International, Bangladesh: Attacks on Members of the Hindu Majority

(Amnesty International, December 2001).
7. Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Patterns of Global Terrorism 2001
(Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, 21 May 2002).
8. Bertil Lintner, “Is Religious Extremism on the Rise in Bangladesh?” Jane’s
Intelligence Review, May 2002.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM AND NATIONALISM IN BANGLADESH 417

Islamic university in the subcontinent, the Dar-ul-Ulum, was located at

Deoband in Saharanpur district of what now is Uttar Pradesh in India,
and its leaders strongly supported the Indian nationalist movement led
by the Congress. The Jamaat-i-Islami, which was founded in 1941 by
Maulana Abul Ala Mauddudi and had grown out of the Deoband
Madrassa (as the university became known), went to the extent of
“alleging that the demand for a separate state based on modern selfish
nationalism amounted to rebelling against the tenets of Islam.”9
But gradually, the Muslim League, led by Muhammed Ali Jinnah,
won support for the Pakistan idea, and when India became independ-
ent in August 1947, two states were born: the secular but Hindu-dom-
inated Union of India—and the Islamic state of Pakistan, which con-
sisted of two parts, one to the west of India and the other to the east.
The Jamaat became one of the strongest supporters of the Pakistan
idea, and, somewhat ironically, the Deobandi movement through its
network of religious schools, or madrassas, developed into a breeding
ground for Pakistan-centered Islamic fundamentalism. Over the
years, the Deobandi brand of Islam has become almost synonymous
with religious extremism and fanaticism.
The Deobandis had actually arisen in British India not as a reac-
tionary force but as a forward-looking movement to unite and reform
Muslim society in the wake of oppression the community faced after
the 1857 revolt, or “Mutiny” as the British called it.10 But in inde-
pendent Pakistan—East and West—new Deobandi madrassas were
set up everywhere and were run by semi-educated mullahs who,
according to Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, “were far removed
from the original reformist agenda of the Deobandi school.”11 Much
later, it was from these madrassas that Afghanistan’s dreaded Talibans
(“Islamic students”) were to emerge.
The Jamaat was from the beginning inspired by the Ikhwan ul-
Muslimeen, or the Muslim Brotherhood, which was set up in Egypt
in 1928 with the aim of bringing about an Islamic revolution and cre-
ating an Islamic state.12 When they had come to accept Pakistan as

9. Kabir, Changing Face of Nationalism, 99.

10. For an excellent account of the rise of the Deobandis, see Salahuddin Babar,
“Rise of the Right,” Probe Newsmagazine (Bangladesh), 1–15 March 2002.
11. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords (London: Pan Books,
2001), 89.
12. Ibid., 86.
418 BERTIL LINTNER

that Islamic state, Bengali nationalism was totally unacceptable. The

Jamaat’s militants fought alongside the Pakistan army against the
Bengali nationalists. Among the most notorious of the Jamaat leaders
was Abdul Kader Molla, who became known as “the Butcher of
Mirpur” (a Dhaka suburb that in 1971 was populated mainly by non-
Bengali Muslim immigrants).13 Today, Molla is the publicity secretary
of Bangladeshi Jamaat and, despite his background, was granted a
U.S. visa to visit New York in the last week of June 2002. In 1971,
Molla and other Jamaat leaders were considered war criminals by the
first government of independent Bangladesh, but they were never
prosecuted as they had fled to Pakistan.
The leaders of the Jamaat returned to Bangladesh during the rule
of Zia and Ershad because they were invited to come back, and they
also saw Ershad especially as a champion of their cause. This was
somewhat ironic as Ershad was—and still is—known as a playboy
and hardly a religiously minded person. But he had introduced a string
of Islamic reforms—and he needed the Jamaat to counter the Awami
League and, like his predecessor Zia, he had to find ideological under-
pinnings for what was basically a military dictatorship. The problem
was that the Jamaat had been discredited by its role in the liberation
war—but, as a new generation emerged, that could be “corrected.”
Jamaat‘s Islamic ideals were taught in Bangladesh’s madrassas, which
multiplied at a tremendous pace.
The madrassas fill an important function in an impoverished coun-
try such as Bangladesh, where basic education is available only to a
few. Today, there are an estimated sixty-four thousand madrassas in
Bangladesh, divided into two kinds. The Aliya madrassas are run with
government support and control, while the or Deoband-style madras-
sas are totally independent. Aliya students study for fifteen to sixteen
years and are taught Arabic, religious theory and other Islamic sub-
jects as well as English, mathematics, science and history. They pre-
pare themselves for employment in government service or for jobs in
the private sector, similar to any other college or university student. In
1999, there were 7,122 such registered madrassas in Bangladesh.14
The much more numerous Deobandi madrassas are more “tradi-
tional”; Islamic studies dominate, and the students are taught Urdu

13. Ahmed Salim, “Murders Most Foul,” Newsline (Pakistan), 29 November 2000.
14. Babar, “Rise of the Right.”
RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM AND NATIONALISM IN BANGLADESH 419

(the national language of Pakistan), Persian and Arabic. After finish-

ing their education, the students are incapable of taking up any main-
stream profession, and the mosques and the madrassas are their main
sources of employment. As Bangladeshi journalist Salahuddin Babar
points out, “passing out from the madrassas, poorly equipped to enter
mainstream life and professions, the students are easily lured by moti-
vated quarters who capitalize on religious sentiment to create fanatics,
rather than modem Muslims.”15
The consequences of this kind of madrassa education can be seen
in the growth of the Jamaat. It did not fare well in the 1996 election,
capturing only three seats in the parliament and 8.61 percent of the
votes.16 Its election manifesto was also quite carefully worded, per-
haps taking into consideration the party’s reputation and the fact that
the vast majority of Bangladeshis remain opposed to Sharia law and
other extreme Islamic practices. The twenty-three-page document
devoted eighteen pages to lofty election promises, and only five to
explaining Jamaat’s political stand. The party tried to reassure the pub-
lic that it would not advocate chopping off thieves’ hands, the ston-
ing of people who had committed adultery, or banning interest—at
least not immediately. According to SEHD: “The priority focus would
be alleviation of poverty, stopping free mixing of sexes and thus
awakening the people to the spirit of Islam and then eventually step
by step the Islamic laws would be introduced.”17
It is impossible to determine how much support the Jamaat actually
had in the 2001 election, as it was part of an alliance whose various
members voted for each other against the Awami League, but its sev-
enteen seats in the new parliament—and two ministers in the govern-
ment—suggest a dramatic increase. Its youth organization, Islami
Chhatra Shibir (ICS), is especially active. It is a member of the
International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations as well as
the World Assembly of Muslim Youth and has close contacts with
other radical Muslim groups in Pakistan, the Middle East, Malaysia
and Indonesia. One of its main strongholds is at the university in
Chittagong, and it dominates the Deobandi madrassas all over the

15. Ibid.
16. Society for Environment and Human Development, The Reporter’s Guide:
Handbook on Election Reporting (Dhaka: Society for Environment and Human
Development, 2001), 101.
17. Ibid.
420 BERTIL LINTNER

country, from where it draws most of its new members. The ICS has
been implicated in a number of bombings and politically and reli-
giously motivated assassinations.
On April 7, 2001, two leaders of the Awami League’s youth and stu-
dent front were killed by ICS activists and on June 15, an estimated
twenty-one people were killed and more than one hundred injured in
a bomb blast at the Awami League party office in the town of
Narayanganj. Two weeks later, the police arrested an ICS activist for
his alleged involvement in the blast.18 A youngish Islamic militant,
Nurul Islam Bulbul, is the ICS’s current president, and Muhammed
Nazrul Islam its general secretary.
For many years the mother party, the Jamaat, was led by Gholam
Azam, who had returned from Pakistan when Zia was still alive and
in power. He resigned in December 2000, and Motiur Rahman
Nizami took over as the new amir of the party amid wide protests
and demands that he be put on trial for war crimes he committed
during the liberation war as the head of a notorious paramilitary
force, the al-Badr. In one particular incident on December 3, 1971,
some members of that force seized the village of Bishalikkha at
night in search of freedom fighters, beating many and killing eight
people. When Nizami’s appointment was made public, veterans of
the liberation war burnt an effigy of him during a public rally.19 In
October 2001, Nizami was appointed minister for agriculture, an
important post in a mainly agricultural country such as Bangladesh.
His deputy, Ali Ahsan Muhammed Mujahid, became minister for
social welfare.
The terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001 occurred
during the election campaign in Bangladesh, when the country was
ruled by a caretaker government. The outgoing prime minister, the
Awami League’s Sheikh Hasina and then opposition leader Khaleda
Zia of the BNP, condemned the attacks and both, if they were
elected, offered the United States use of Bangladesh’s air space, ports
and other facilities to launch military attacks against the Taliban and
al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Many Bangladeshis were moved by the loss
of as many as fifty of their countrymen in the attacks on the World

18. “Bangladesh Assessment 2002,” Southasia Terrorism Portal (Indian website, 2001);
www.satp.org.
19. Bangladesh Broadcasting Service, 8 December 2000.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM AND NATIONALISM IN BANGLADESH 421

Trade Center. While some of them were immigrants working as

computer analysts and engineers, most seem to have been waiters at
the Window on the World restaurant who were working hard to send
money back to poor relatives in Bangladesh. A Bangladeshi embassy
official in Washington branded the attacks “an affront to Islam … an
attack on humanity.”20
Jamaat’s stand on the “war against terrorism,” however, contrasts
sharply to that of the more established parties. Shortly after the U.S.
attacks on Afghanistan began in October 2001, the Jamaat created a
fund purportedly for “helping the innocent victims of America’s
war.” According to the Jamaat’s own announcements, 12 million
Bangladeshi taka ($210,000) was raised before the effort was discon-
tinued in March 2002. Any remaining funds, the Jamaat then said,
would go to Afghan refugees in camps in Pakistan.21

The Rise of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami and

Other Extremist Groups
THE GROWTH OF THE JAMAAT during the Ershad regime paved the way
for the establishment of even more radical groups when the BNP
returned to power in 1991. According to Bangladeshi journalists, in
the early 1990s Bangladeshi diplomats in Saudi Arabia issued pass-
ports to Pakistani militants in the kingdom to enable them to escape
to Bangladesh.22 Other extremists from Pakistan—and perhaps also
Afghanistan—appear to have been able to enter Bangladesh in the
same way during that period.
These men were instrumental in building up HUJI, which was first
formed in 1992, reportedly with funds from Osama bin Laden.23 The
existence of firm links between the new Bangladeshi militants and al-
Qaeda was proven when Fazlul Rahman, leader of the “Jihad
Movement in Bangladesh” (to which HUJI belongs), signed the offi-
cial declaration of “holy war” against the United States on February
23, 1998. Other signatories included bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri
(leader of the Jihad Group in Egypt), Rifa’i Ahmad Taha (aka Abu-

20. http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/01100321.htm.
21. Holiday (Bangladesh), 8 March 2002.
22. Communication with a Bangladeshi journalist who has requested anonymity,
April 2002.
23. Southasia Terrorism Portal; www.satp.org.
422 BERTIL LINTNER

Yasir, Egyptian Islamic Group), and Sheikh Mir Hamzah (secretary of

the Jamiat Ulema Pakistan).24
HUJI is headed by Shawkat Osman (aka Maulana or Sheikh Farid)
in Chittagong and, according to the U.S. State Department, has “at
least six camps” in Bangladesh.25 Similar to the ICS, HUJI draws
most of its members from the country’s Deobandi madrassas and
has shown it is capable of extreme violence. Bangladesh’s Islamic
radicals first came to international attention in 1993 when author
Taslima Nasrin was forced to flee the country after receiving death
threats. The fundamentalists objected to her critical writings about
what she termed outdated religious beliefs. Extremist groups
offered a $5,000 reward for her death. She now lives in exile in
France.
While Nasrin’s outspoken, feminist writings caused controversy
even among moderate Bangladeshi Muslims, the entire state was
shocked when, in early 1999, three men attempted to kill Shams ur-
Rahman, a well-known poet and symbol of Bangladesh’s secular
nationhood. During the ensuing arrests, the police said they seized
a list of several intellectuals and writers, including Nasrin, whom
Bangladeshi religious extremists had branded “enemies of
Islam.”26
Bangladeshi human rights organizations openly accuse HUJI of
being behind both the death threats against Nasrin and the attempt to
kill Rahman. The U.S. State Department notes that HUJI has been
accused of stabbing a senior Bangladeshi journalist in November
2000 for making a documentary on the plight of Hindus in
Bangladesh, and the July 2000 assassination attempt of then prime
minister Sheikh Hasina.27
As with the Jamaat and the ICS, HUJI’s main stronghold is in the
lawless southeast, which includes the border with Burma. With its
fluid population and weak law enforcement, the region has long been
a haven for smugglers, gunrunners, pirates, and ethnic insurgents

24. See ERRI Daily Intelligence report, ERRI Risk Assessment Service, vol. 4 (11 June
1998), 162. The full text of the 1998 fatwah is also available on http://www.ict.org.il/
articles/fatwah.htm and http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm.
25. Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Patterns of Global Terrorism 2001.
26. Turkkaya Ataov, Kashmir and Neighbours: Tale, Terror, Truce (Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate Publishing, 2001), 150.
27. Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Patterns of Global Terrorism 2001.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM AND NATIONALISM IN BANGLADESH 423

from across the Burmese border. The past decade has seen a massive
influx of weapons, especially small arms, through the fishing port of
Cox’s Bazaar, which has made the situation in the southeast even
more dangerous and volatile.28
The winner in the 2001 election in one of the constituencies in
Cox’s Bazaar, BNP candidate Shahjahan Chowdhury, was said to be
supported by “the man allegedly leading smuggling operations in [the
border town of] Teknaf.” Instead of the regular army, the paramilitary
Bangladesh Rifles were deployed in this constituency to help the
police in their electoral peacekeeping. This was, according to SEHD,
“criticized by the local people who alleged that the Bangladesh Rifles
were well connected with the smuggling activities and thus could take
partisan roles.”29
In one of the most recent high-profile attacks in the area, Gopal
Krishna Muhuri, the sixty-year-old principal of Nazirhat College in
Chittagong and a leading secular humanist, was gunned down in
November 2001 in his home by four hired assassins who belonged to
a gang patronized by the Jamaat.30 India, which is viewing the growth
of Bangladesh’s Islamic movements with deep concern, has linked
HUJI militants to the attack on the American Center in Kolkata
(Calcutta) in January 2002, and a series of bomb blasts in the state of
Assam in mid-1999.31
On May 10–11, 2002, nine Islamic fundamentalist groups, includ-
ing HUJI, met at a camp near the small town of Ukhia south of
Cox’s Bazaar and formed the Bangladesh Islamic Manch
(Association). The new umbrella organization also includes one pur-
porting to represent the Rohingyas, a Muslim minority in Burma, and
the Muslim Liberation Tigers of Assam, a small group operating in
India’s Northeast. By June, Bangladeshi veterans of the anti-Soviet
war in Afghanistan in the 1980s were reported to be training mem-
bers of the new alliance in at least two camps in southern
Bangladesh.32

28. Small Arms Survey 2001: Profiling the Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press;
Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2001), 181.
29. Eighth Parliamentary Elections 2001, 99.
30. Amnesty International, Bangladesh: Attacks on Hindu Majority.
31. The Hindu, 23 January 2002. See also Subir Bhaumik, “The Second Front of
Islamic Terror in South Asia” (paper presented at an international seminar on terror-
ism and low-intensity conflict, Jadvpur University, Kolkata, 6–8 March 2002).
32. Far Eastern Economic Review, 11 July 2002.
424 BERTIL LINTNER

The Plight of the Rohingyas

THE ARAKAN AREA OF BURMA was separated from the rest of the
country by a densely forested mountain range, which made it possible
for the Arakanese—most of whom are Buddhist—to maintain their
independence until the late eighteenth century. Contacts with the out-
side world had until then been mostly with the West, which, in turn, had
brought Islam to the region. The first Muslims on the Arakan coast
were Moorish, Arab and Persian traders who arrived between the ninth
and the fifteenth centuries. Some of them stayed and married local
women. Their offspring became the forefathers of yet another hybrid
race, which much later was to become known as the Rohingyas. Like
the people in the Chittagong area, they speak a Bengali dialect inter-
spersed with words borrowed from Persian, Urdu and Arakanese.33
There is no evidence of friction between Rohingyas and their
Buddhist neighbors in the earlier days. Indeed, after 1430 the
Arakanese kings, though Buddhists, even used Muslim titles in addi-
tion to their own names and issued medallions bearing the kalima, or
Muslim confession of faith.34 Persian was the court language until the
Burmese invasion in 1784. Burmese rule lasted until the first Anglo-
Burmese war of 1824–26, when Arakan was taken over by the British
along with the Tenasserim region of southeastern Burma.
When Burma was a part of British India, the rich ricelands of
Arakan attracted thousands of seasonal laborers, especially from the
Chittagong area of adjacent East Bengal. Many of them found it con-
venient to stay since there was already a large Muslim population who
spoke the same language and, at that time, there was no ill feeling
toward immigrants from India proper—unlike the situation in other
parts of Burma, where people of subcontinental origin were
despised. At the same time, Buddhist Arakanese migrated to East
Bengal and settled along the coast between Chittagong and Cox’s
Bazaar. The official border, the Naf River, united rather than sepa-
rated the two British territories.
But the presence of a Muslim minority in Arakan became an issue
after Burma’s independence in 1948. The Buddhist and Muslim

33. For a comprehensive account of the Rohingyas and other Muslim communities
in Burma, see Moshe Yegar, The Muslims of Burma: A Study of a Minority Group
(Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1972).
34. Ibid., 19.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM AND NATIONALISM IN BANGLADESH 425

communities had become divided during World War Two; the

Buddhists had rallied behind the Japanese while the Muslims had
remained loyal to the British. Some Muslims, fearing reprisals from the
Buddhists once the British were gone, rose up in arms, demanding an
independent state, and the Burmese army was sent in to quell the rebel-
lion. Predominantly Buddhist Burma never really recognized the
Arakanese Muslims—who in the 1960s began to refer to themselves as
“Rohingya,” a term of disputed origin—as one of the country’s
“indigenous” ethnic groups. As such, and because of their different reli-
gion and physical appearance, Rohingyas have often become convenient
scapegoats for Burma’s military government to rally the public against
whenever that country has been hit by an economic or political crisis.
In March 1978, the Burmese government launched a campaign
code-named Naga Min (Dragon King) in Arakan, ostensibly to “check
illegal immigrants.” Hundreds of heavily armed troops raided Muslim
neighborhoods in Sittwe (Akyab) and some five thousand people
were arrested. As the operation was extended to other parts of
Arakan, tens of thousands of Rohingyas crossed the border to
Bangladesh. By the end of June, approximately two hundred thou-
sand Rohingyas had fled, causing an international outcry.35 Eventually,
most of the refugees were allowed to return, but thousands found it
safer to remain on the Bangladesh side of the border. Entire commu-
nities of “illegal immigrants” from Burma sprang up along the bor-
der south of Cox’s Bazaar, and a steady trickle of refugees from
Burma continued to cross into Bangladesh throughout the 1980s.
The immensely wealthy Saudi Arabian charity Rabitat al Alam al
Islami began sending aid to the Rohingya refugees during the 1978
crisis and also built a hospital and a madrassa at Ukhia, south of Cox’s
Bazaar. Prior to these events, there was only one political organization
among the Rohingyas on the Bangladesh-Burma border, the
Rohingya Patriotic Front (RPF), which was set up in 1974 by
Muhammed Jafar Habib, a native of Buthidaung in Arakan and a
graduate of Rangoon University. He made several appeals—most of
them unsuccessful—to the international Islamic community for help,
and maintained a camp for his small guerrilla army, which operated
from the Bangladeshi side of the border.

35. For an account of the 1978 refugee crisis, see Lintner, Burma in Revolt: Opium
and Insurgency Since 1948 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999), 317–18.
426 BERTIL LINTNER

In the early 1980s, more radical elements among the Rohingyas

broke away from the RPF to set up the Rohingya Solidarity
Organization (RSO). Led by a medical doctor from Arakan,
Muhammed Yunus, it soon became the main and most militant fac-
tion among the Rohingyas in Bangladesh and on the border. Given its
more rigid religious stand, the RSO soon enjoyed support from like-
minded groups in the Muslim world. These included Jamaat-i-Islami
in Bangladesh and Pakistan, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami in
Afghanistan, Hizbe-ul Mujahideen in Kashmir and Angkatan Belia
Islam sa-Malaysia (ABIM), the Islamic Youth Organization of
Malaysia. Afghan instructors were seen in some of the RSO camps
along the Bangladesh-Burma border, while nearly one hundred RSO
rebels were reported to be undergoing training in the Afghan
province of Khost with Hizb-e-Islami Mujahideen.36
The RSO’s main military camp was located near the hospital that
the Rabitat had built at Ukhia. At the time, the RSO acquired a sub-
stantial number of Chinese-made RPG-2 rocket launchers, light
machine guns, AK-47 assault rifles, claymore mines and explosives
from private arms dealers in the Thai town of Aranyaprathet near
Thailand’s border with Cambodia, which in the 1980s emerged as a
major arms bazaar for guerrilla movements in the region. These
weapons were siphoned off from Chinese arms shipments to the
resistance battling the Vietnamese army in Cambodia, and sold to
anyone who wanted—and could afford—to buy them.37
The Bangladeshi media gave quite extensive coverage to the RSO
buildup along the border, but it soon became clear that it was not only
Rohingyas who underwent training in its camps. Many, it turned out,
were members of lCS and came from the University of Chittagong,
where a “campus war” was being fought between Islamic militants
and more moderate student groups.38 The RSO was, in fact, engaged
in little or no fighting inside Burma.
There was also a more moderate faction among the Rohingyas in
Bangladesh, the Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front (ARIF), which was
set up in 1986, uniting the remnants of the old RPF and a handful of

36. Lintner, “Tension Mounts in Arakan State,” Jane’s Defense Weekly, 19 October
1991. The story was based on interview with Rohingyas and others in the Cox’s
Bazaar area in 1991. I also visited a Rohingya army camp near the border with Burma.
37. Ibid.
38. Interviews and observations I made when I visited the border in 1991.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM AND NATIONALISM IN BANGLADESH 427

defectors from the RSO. It was led by Nurul Islam, a Rangoon-edu-

cated lawyer. But it never had more than a few dozen soldiers, mostly
equipped with elderly, UK-made 9mm Sterling L2A3 sub-machine
guns, bolt action .303 rifles and a few M-16 assault rifles.39 In 1998,
ARIF became the Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO),
maintaining its moderate stance and barely surviving in exile in
Chittagong and Cox’s Bazaar.
The expansion of the RSO in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and
the unprecedented publicity the group attracted in the local and inter-
national media, prompted the Burmese government to launch a mas-
sive counter-offensive to “clear up” the border area. In December
1991, Burmese troops crossed the border and attacked a Bangladeshi
military outpost. The incident developed into a major crisis in
Bangladesh-Burma relations, and by April 1992 more than 250,000
Rohingya civilians had been forced out of Arakan.
Hardly by coincidence, this second massive exodus of Rohingyas
occurred at a time when Burma was engulfed in a major political cri-
sis. The pro-democracy National League for Democracy (NLD) had
won a landslide victory in a general election in May 1990, but the
country’s military government refused to convene the elected
assembly. There were anti-government demonstrations in the north-
ern city of Mandalay, and the ruling Burmese junta was condemned
internationally.
The Rohingya refugees were housed in a string of makeshift camps
south of Cox’s Bazaar, prompting the Bangladeshi government to
appeal for help from the international community. The United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) came in to run
the camps and to negotiate with the Burmese government for the
return of the Rohingyas. In Apri1 1992, Prince Khaled Sultan Abdul
Aziz, commander of the Saudi contingent in the 1991 Gulf War, vis-
ited Dhaka and recommended a Desert Storm-like action against
Burma, “just what [the UN] did to liberate Kuwait.”40
That, of course, never happened, and the Burmese government,
under pressure from the United Nations, eventually agreed to take
most of the refugees back. But an estimated twenty thousand destitute

39. Jane’s Defense Weekly, 19 October 1991.

40. For an account of the 1991–92 Rohingya refugee crisis, see Lintner, Burma in
Revolt, 397–98.
428 BERTIL LINTNER

refugees remain in two camps between Cox’s Bazaar and the border.
In addition, an undisclosed number of Rohingyas, perhaps as many as
100,000 to 150,000, continue to live outside the UNHCR-supervised
camps. There is little doubt that extremist groups have taken advan-
tage of the disenfranchised Rohingyas, including recruiting them as
cannon fodder for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere. In an
interview with the Karachi-based newspaper Ummat on September
28, 2001, bin Laden said, “there are areas in all parts of the world
where strong jihadi forces are present, from Bosnia to Sudan, and
from Burma to Kashmir.”41 He was most probably referring to a
small group of Rohingyas on the Bangladesh-Burma border.
Many of the Rohingya recruits were given the most dangerous task
in the battlefield: clearing mines and pottering. According to Asian
intelligence sources, Rohingya recruits were paid 30,000 Bangladeshi
taka ($525) on joining and then 10,000 taka ($175) per month. The
families of recruits killed in action were offered 100,000 taka
($1,750).42 Recruits were taken mostly via Nepal to Pakistan, where
they were trained and sent on to military camps in Afghanistan. It is
not known how many people from this part of Bangladesh—
Rohingyas and others—fought in Afghanistan, but it is believed to be
quite substantial. Others went to Kashmir and even Chechnya to join
forces with Islamic militants there.43
In an interview with CNN in December 2001, American “taliban”
fighter, John Walker Lindh related that the al-Qaeda-directed ansar
(companions of the Prophet) brigades, to which he had belonged in
Afghanistan, were divided along linguistic lines: “Bengali, Pakistani
(Urdu) and Arabic,” which suggests that the Bengali-speaking compo-
nent—Bangladeshi and Rohingya—must have been significant.44 In
early 2002, Afghanistan’s foreign minister, Dr. Abdullah, told a
Western journalist that “we have captured one Malaysian and one or
two supporters from Burma.”45

41. See also Jim Garamone, “Bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda Network,” American
Forces Press Service, 21 September 2001: “Al-Qaeda has cells in Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia,
Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Dagestan, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Azerbaijan,
Eritrea, Uganda, Ethiopia, and in the West Bank and Gaza.”
42. Jane’s Intelligence Review, May 2002.
43. Bhaumik, “The Second Front.”
44. Transcript of John Walker Interview, CNN, 21 December 2001.
45. Lintner, “A Recipe for Trouble,” Far Eastern Economic Review, 4 April 2002. The
comment was made to Michael Vatikiotis, editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM AND NATIONALISM IN BANGLADESH 429

In January 2001, Bangladesh clamped down on Rohingya activists

and offices in Chittagong and Cox’s Bazaar, most probably in an
attempt to improve relations with Burma. Hundreds were rounded
up, and the local press was full of reports of their alleged involvement
in gun- and drug-running. Rohingya leaders vehemently deny such
accusations and blame local Bangladeshi gangs with high-level con-
nections for the violence in the area. But the Rohingyas were forced
to evacuate their military camps, which had always been located on
the Bangladesh side of the border. Recent reports from the area sug-
gest that HUJI and other Bangladeshi Islamic groups have taken over
these camps, with the main base being the one the RSO used to main-
tain near the Rabitat-built hospital in Ukhia.46

Attacks on Secular Muslims and Religious Minorities

What now is Bangladesh—and initially East Bengal and then East
Pakistan—has undergone dramatic demographic changes during the
past sixty years. According to the 1941 Census of India, Hindus made
up 28 percent of the population of then East Bengal. Twenty years
later, when East Pakistan was well established, the number had
decreased to 18.5 percent. More left during the liberation war in 1971,
when the Pakistani army targeted Hindus specifically. By 1974, only
13.5 percent of the population of independent Bangladesh was
Hindu. According to the latest estimate, the figure is now down to 9
percent.47 At the same time, large numbers of Buddhists from the
Chittagong Hill Tracts—Bangladesh’s other main religious minor-
ity—have fled to India.
The fall of the Awami League and the murder of Mujib-ur Rahman
in August 1975, followed by the military takeover by Maj. Gen. Zia in
November of that year, ushered in a new era of Bangladeshi nation-
alism, where the religious and ethnic minorities had little or no place.
Mujib’s immediate successor, Khondkar Mushtaq Ahmed, who was a
senior member of the Awami League but known for his Islamic and
pro-Pakistan leanings, began to conclude his speeches with Bangladesh
Zindabad (long live Bangladesh, but “zindabad” is a Persian word)

46. I visited the area, including Ukhia, in March 2002.

47. The figures are based on information from Bangladesh’s Ministry of Planning,
Bureau of Statistics. See also Jaideep Saikia, Islamic Resurgence in Bangladesh (paper dis-
seminated by bangladesherdak@yahoogroups.com, May 2002).
430 BERTIL LINTNER

rather than the war cry of the liberation struggle, Joi Bangla (both
words being Bengali). This soon became common practice in govern-
ment announcements and radio broadcasts.
A shift in foreign policy was also noticeable. Bangladesh’s first gov-
ernment had emphasized friendship with India and the Soviet Union.
Zia’s government steered Bangladesh closer to Pakistan, China and
Saudi Arabia.48 Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI), became active in Bangladesh again, working closely
with its local counterpart, the Directorate General of Forces
Intelligence (DGFI). Pakistan never fully recovered from the loss of
East Pakistan, and never forgave India for the role it played in the
birth of Bangladesh by sending troops to fight the Pakistani army.
The idea of Bangladesh rejoining Pakistan was out of the question
after the extremely bloody liberation war, in which millions died. But
Pakistan was determined to regain its influence over its former east-
ern part and, especially, to keep Indian influence there to an absolute
minimum. Zia’s policies, including allowing the Jamaat to return,
served these interests, and the Pakistanis, quite naturally, emphasized
the main bond that united the two countries: Islam.
Historian M.G. Kabir argues that Zia’s propagation of a new brand
of Bangladeshi nationalism was a scheme “to simultaneously consol-
idate feelings of nationhood, provide a series of symbols for unifying
the country, contribute to the enthusiasm with which nation-building
activities are pursued, and, ultimately maintain the identity and
integrity of Bangladesh as a nation-state independent of India.49 In a
posthumously published article written by Zia, he lists seven factors
that he considers to be the bases of Bangladeshi nationalism: territory,
people irrespective of religion, Bengali language, culture, economic
life, religion, and the legacy of the 1971 liberation war.50 There is an
obvious contradiction between “people irrespective of religion” and
“religion,” and that has since been the dilemma for Bangladesh’s non-
Muslim population. Ershad’s declaration of Islam as the state religion
made it clear that “religion” in a Bangladeshi context means Islam.
Bangladesh’s Islamic identity has grown stronger over the years, and
after the October 2001 election there has been a marked increase in

48. Kabir, Changing Face of Nationalism, 196–97.

49. Ibid., 199.
50. Ibid.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM AND NATIONALISM IN BANGLADESH 431

the number of attacks on non-Muslim population groups. These

attacks appear to have been prompted by a desire to build a real
“nation-state,” free from minorities, and motivated by political
revenge. Amnesty International reported in December 2001: “Hindus
in Bangladesh have tended to vote for the Awami League. They have
therefore been the target of a political backlash by supporters of par-
ties opposing Awami League.” In Ziodhara, one of the worst affected
villages, several hundred Hindu villagers left the area. In another vil-
lage, Deuatala Bazaar, gangs of young men wielding sharp weapons
reportedly went from door to door telling Hindus to “go away.”51 In
Chandaikona Bazaar another youth gang damaged Hindu statues and
looted the temple.52
The Amnesty report continues: “Human rights organizations in
Bangladesh believe over 100 women have been subjected to rape.
Reports persistently allege that the perpetrators have been manly
members of the BNP and its coalition partner Jamaat-e-Islami.”53 As
a result, thousands of Bangladeshi Hindus have fled to India, often
leaving their belongings and land behind. The exact number of
refugees is uncertain, as they tend to blend in with the largely Hindu
population of the Indian states of West Bengal, Assam and Tripura.
Other religious minorities have also been targeted. In December
2001, a Bangladeshi newspaper reported that young women from fifty
Christian families in Natoore were living in fear of hoodlums who
would roar past their huts on motorcycles at night. The hoodlums
demanded ransom of 10,000 to 20,000 Bangladeshi taka ($175–350)
from men in the village—or their daughters. The villagers had also
had their crops taken away after the October election.54 In April 2002
a well-known Buddhist monk, Ganojyoti Mohasthobir, was murdered
by a group of thugs who demanded he paid them “infidel protection
tax.”55
But moderate Muslims have also become victims. On November
22, 2001 prominent journalist and writer Shahriar Kabir was arrested
at Dhaka International Airport on his return from Kolkata. He had

51. Amnesty International, Bangladesh: Attacks on Hindu Majority.

52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Human Rights Congress for Bangladesh Minorities, Give Ransom or Girl, Order
Hoodlums: 50 Christian Families of Natoore Subjugated by Nightmare, 8 December 2001.
55. The Daily Janakantha (Bangladesh), 23 April 2002.
432 BERTIL LINTNER

been to India to cover the plight of the Hindus who had fled perse-
cution in Bangladesh and had his video tapes, film and camera confis-
cated by the police at the airport. He was held in custody for nineteen
days before he was released on bail. In March 2002 two staff mem-
bers of the NGO Proshika (“a Center for Human Development”),
Omar Tarek Chawdhury and Ajhar-ul Hoque, were arrested on alle-
gations that they had been in possession of “documents” relating to
attacks against Hindus.56
Their arrest came only weeks after the Danish and German ambas-
sadors in Dhaka had asked the Bangladesh government to “take
immediate steps to stop all sorts of repression and attacks on the
country’s religious and other minorities.”57 But there are no signs that
this is about to happen. On the contrary, the future of the country’s
religious and ethnic minorities appears bleak, as “Bangladeshi nation-
alism” is becoming synonymous with a stronger Muslim identity, and
Islamic groups are becoming increasingly fierce in their public state-
ments and actions.

Conclusion
IN DECEMBER 2001 Maulana Ubaidul Haq, the khatib (cleric) of
Bangladesh’s national mosque, Baitul Mukarram, and a Jamaat associ-
ate publicly condemned the U.S. war on terror and urged followers to
wage a holy war against the United States. “President Bush and
America is the most heinous terrorist in the world. Both America and
Bush must be destroyed. The Americans will be washed away if
Bangladesh’s 120 million Muslims spit on them,” the cleric told a
gathering of hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi Muslims, which
included several high-ranking officials in the new government that
took over in October 2001.58
Despite the virulent rhetoric, it is highly unlikely that Bangladesh’s
120 million Muslims would spit on the Americans, or wage a holy war
against anybody. Bangladesh’s secular roots are holding, at least for
the time being. But the country’s Islamic extremists are becoming

56. Amnesty International, Press release ASA 13/005/2002, 15 March 2002.

57. News from Bangladesh, 8 March 2002. http://www/bangladesh-web.com/
news/mar/08/08032002.htm.
58. Muktadhara, “a website for Bengalis,” http://members.tripod.com/scohel/
page03.html.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM AND NATIONALISM IN BANGLADESH 433

more vocal and daring in their attacks on “infidels,” a worrisome sign

in what is basically a very tolerant society. And it is not the number of
extremists that matters—even a small group can spread fear and ter-
ror—but how well organized and dedicated they are.
Bangladesh’s Islamic extremists are becoming better organized, as
the May meeting at Ukhia of nine militant groups shows. The prolif-
eration of small arms and an ensuing increase in violence of all kinds,
especially in that part of the country, are also a growing concern.
These factors have prompted the country’s donors, who met in Paris
in March 2002, to tag aid to an improvement in the law and order sit-
uation. In mid-2001, the estimated number of illegal arms in
Bangladesh was 250,000, of which only 5,481 were recovered during
a crackdown in the lead-up to the general election in October 2001.59
In early 2002, three leading local human rights groups in Bangladesh
reported that a total of 258 people were murdered in March alone, of
which thirty-nine were political killings. In the month of February, the
number of murders was 336, including a journalist, according to the
Institute of Democratic Watch, a Bangladeshi NGO.60
A culture of violence, especially among the young, is emerging, and
many young Islamic militants are now armed. The role of the madras-
sas in shaping the next generation of Bangladeshis also cannot be
underestimated. By including the Jamaat in her cabinet, Khaleda Zia
is playing with fire. On the other hand, Bangladesh remains heavily
dependent on foreign aid and cannot afford to antagonize its most
important donor countries, mainly Japan and the West. It should,
therefore, be in the government’s interest to contain the spread of
Islamic extremism. But so far, very little has been done to counter the
propaganda and activities of the extremists, and Khaleda Zia has pub-
licly—and angrily—stated in response to the inclusion of two Jamaat
ministers in her cabinet that “there are no talibans in my govern-
ment.”61 By contrast, even in the streets of Dhaka, activists of the
Jamaat, ICS and HUJI used to proudly identify themselves as
“Bangladeshi talibans,” although they stopped using that label, at least
in public, following the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and
Washington.

59. Eighth Parliamentary Elections 2001, 17.

60. The Hindu (India), 2 April 2002.
61. Ibid., 11 January 2002.
434 BERTIL LINTNER

Some Western diplomats in Dhaka also tend to downplay the

extremist threat, viewing local militant Islamic movements as rather
insignificant fringe groups. During a breakfast meeting in May 2002
in Washington sponsored by the U.S.-Bangladesh Advisory Council,
Mary Ann Peters, the ambassador of the United States to Bangladesh,
rejected reports of a growing extremist threat. She termed a report in
the April 2, 2002 issue of the Wall Street Journal as “an example of lack
of understanding on the part of journalists covering the country’s
political and social structure.” She went on to criticize a similar story
in the April 4, 2002 issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review and called
the reporter “lazy” for not working hard enough on the subject and
for his failure to give any “clue” in the article that might help make
further investigations. She also asserted that media reports about vio-
lence against the Hindu community were “exaggerations of facts on
the ground.” The U.S. embassy in Dhaka had sent its officers to ver-
ify the media reports, and in all cases it was found that the actual sit-
uation was less worrisome than what they appeared to be, she said.62
It is uncertain whether the U.S. ambassador’s statements were moti-
vated by a desire to be overly diplomatic, or if they were based on
poor intelligence. But such denials will only exacerbate what undoubt-
edly is a growing problem. It is also important to emphasize that the
rise of religious extremism and intolerance in Bangladesh is not just a
side effect of military politics. According to Eneyetullah Khan, editor
of the Bangladesh weekly Holiday, the issue reflects the struggle of a
young and fragile nation to find a national identity: “We’re having a bit
of an identity crisis here. Are we Bengalis first and Muslims second,
or Muslims first and Bengalis second? This is the problem. And when
Muslim identity becomes an Islamic identity we’re in real trouble.”63
As Indonesia—another country that until recently was considered a
moderate Muslim state—has shown, an economic collapse or politi-
cal crisis can give rise to militants for whom religious fanaticism
equals national pride; and a way out of misrule, disorder and corrupt
worldly politics.

62. A summary of Peters’s talk was posted on the internet (bangladesherdak@

yahoogroups.com) shortly after the event. I was the author of the articles in both the
Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review.
63. Enayetullah Khan, interview by author, Dhaka, 15 March 2002.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM AND NATIONALISM IN BANGLADESH 435

Appendix 1.
Main Islamic Groups in Bangladesh

Jamaat-i-Islami
A political party that dates back to the British colonial era and the
(East) Pakistan period (1947–71). It supported Pakistan against the
Bengali nationalists during the liberation war, and most of its leaders
fled to (West) Pakistan after Bangladesh’s independence in 1971. Its
then amir, or leader, Gholam Azam, fought against the freedom fight-
ers in 1971, but returned to Bangladesh a few years later. In
December 2000, Motiur Rahman Nizami, another former pro-
Pakistani militant, took over as amir of the Jamaat. In the
October2001 election, the Jamaat emerged as the third largest party
with seventeen seats in the parliament and two ministers in the new
coalition government. The Jamaat’s final aim is an Islamic state in
Bangladesh, although this will be implemented step by step.

Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS)

Jamaat’s youth organization. Set up in 1941, it became a member of
the International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations in
1979. ICS is also a member of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth
and has close contacts with other radical Muslim youth groups in
Pakistan, the Middle East, Malaysia and Indonesia. One of its main
strongholds in Bangladesh is at the university in Chittagong, and it
dominates privately run madrassas all over the country. ICS has been
involved in a number of bomb blasts and politically and religiously
motivated assassinations. Nurul Islam Bulbul is its current president
and Muhammed Nazrul Islam is the secretary general.

Islami Oikyo Jote (IOJ)

A smaller Islamic party that in 2001 joined the four-party alliance
led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which won the
October 2001 election. The IOJ secured two seats in the parliament,
but did not get any cabinet posts. The fourth member of the alliance,
a faction of the Jatyio Party led by Naziur Rahman Manzur, has no
obvious Islamic profile.
436 BERTIL LINTNER

Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami (HUJI)

Bangladesh’s main militant outfit. Set up in 1992, it now has an esti-
mated strength of fifteen thousand and is headed by Shawkat Osman
(aka Maulana or Sheikh Farid) in Chittagong. HUJI’s members are
recruited mainly from students of the country’s many madrassas, and
until 2001 they called themselves “Bangladeshi Taliban.” The group is
believed to have extensive contacts with Muslim organizations in the
Indian states of West Bengal and Assam.

“The Jihad Movement”

Osama bin Laden’s February 23, 1998 fatwah urging jihad against
the United States was co-signed by two Egyptian clerics, one from
Pakistan, and Fazlul Rahman, “leader of the Jihad Movement in
Bangladesh.” The Jihad Movement is not believed to be a separate
organization but a common name for several Islamic groups in
Bangladesh, of which HUJI is considered the largest and most
important.

Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO)

A political group among Rohingya migrants from Burma who live
in the Chittagong–Cox’s Bazaar area and claim to be fighting for an
autonomous Muslim region in Burma’s Arakan (Rakhine) State.
ARNO was set up in 1998 through a merger of the Arakan Rohingya
Islamic Front (ARIF) and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization
(RSO). Within months, however, the front fell apart. The leader of
what remains of ARNO, Nurul Islam, is considered a moderate. He
also led the ARIF before the merger in 1998.

Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO)

Following the breakup of ARNO in 1999–2000, three new factions
emerged, all of them reclaiming the old name RSO. Traditionally, the
RSO has been very close to Jamaat-i-Islami and Islami Chhatra Shibir
in Chittagong and Cox’s Bazaar. In the early 1990s, RSO had several
military camps near the Burmese border, where cadres from the
Islami Chhatra Shibir were also trained in guerrilla warfare.